When my grandparents first traveled to Hong Kong in 1965, they visited many of the typical tourist attractions back then: the Peak, the Zoological and Botanical Gardens, and the several floating restaurants spread across the territory. But what struck me most about their slides were the images from the Shek Kip Mei public housing estate.
You write about early 1980s Macau. Not only has there been little set in Macau in terms of fiction, but that period is also special since it’s during the early days of development. How did you research that period?
I found a very old book by Ian Fleming called Thrilling Cities (1963) in Chowrasta Market in Penang, Malaysia, whose strapline was “Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, takes you on an offbeat tour of the flesh pots of Far Asia and America.” It had fascinating, lurid, sexy black-and-white photographs of “thrilling cities” which included Chicago and Macau in the golden days of the 1950s and 1960s.
My mother is one of the most worldly travelers I know. Mention any city or country around the world, and she’s either been there or is game for going. “What about Panama City?” I asked. She agreed immediately.
Panama City had been on my mind since reading Cristina Henriquez’s The World in Half and Come Together, Fall Apart. Both books are set in the city. Panama City also boasts one of only six or seven Chinatowns in Latin America. I’d been to the Chinatown in Havana 14 years earlier, had spent most of the 1990s in Hong Kong, and am interested in the Chinese diaspora. Plus, my oldest son from my first marriage is Chinese, so I’m raising all of my kids with Chinese culture and working out what that means along the way. Cristina Henriquez had told me the Chinese community in Panama arrived long before the construction of the canal (both the French and United States’ iterations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).
Spencer Wise’s debut novel, The Emperor of Shoes, came out on June 5 from Hanover Square Press, an imprint of the romance publisher Harlequin. His story centers around Alex Cohen, a Jewish-American man who travels to his father’s shoe factory in Foshan, a city of seven million in the southern province of Guangdong. Alex’s father would like him to take over the family business, but instead Alex falls in love with Ivy, a factory worker and pro-democracy activist. According to his biography, Wise “comes from a long line of shoemakers dating back many generations to the shtetls in Poland.” He also spent time living in a shoe factory dormitory in southern China in preparation for writing his book.
Surprisingly, there haven’t been many books published in the US set in Guangdong. Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls is the only one that comes to mind. I recently asked Wise about that lacuna, as well as cultural appropriation in literature and why American men writing about China tend to shy away from romance in their books.
Sometime during my early years of learning Mandarin, I heard the name Michelle Vosper. If memory serves me right, my Mandarin tutor back in 1990 mentioned a friend or acquaintance in Hong Kong, where I was headed at the end of that summer for a study abroad year. I never met Ms. Vosper that year or the other four I lived in Hong Kong, but it seemed serendipitous when I was introduced to her book late last year in Chicago by the English translators of Hong Kong playwright Candace Chong’s Wild Boar.
Vosper’s edited volume, Creating Across Cultures: Women in the Arts from China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, features 16 women artists from Greater China, including Chong, one of Hong Kong’s most sought-after playwrights.
